


nothingness of days; creatures of the deep

by bestliars



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Airships, Biopunk, M/M, Monsters, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 19:57:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1359886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bestliars/pseuds/bestliars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Biomechanical ships may be good conversationalists, but Darcy’s life is hard enough without letting one interfere in his love life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nothingness of days; creatures of the deep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pax/gifts).



> This story is for Pax, and all the fans of the dearly departed Houston Aeros.
> 
> A very long time ago I brought up my fear of Aero’s logo and the idea of a biopunk adventure, and Pax suggested Marco Scandella with engine grease. Months later on tumblr she gave me a prompt for Darcy/Scandi AU of my choosing, and well, this happened.   
> (Also I’ve been working this since June. Weird.)
> 
> The title is from “Whisper of the Waves” by Buck 65. Go listen to it, it’s awesome. http://youtu.be/yK0cou-iw_U
> 
> Endless gratitude for Stellarer for being endlessly patient with me, and is a damn fine beta.
> 
> Also, warning if you have issues with worms or sea monster like things I guess?

It begins with the worms.

The worms keep gaining ground. They’ve been wiggling out of caverns, spreading as a sea of writhing invertebrate appendages reaching out, hoping to snare another beating heart to bring into the wormmass. 

No one knows exactly where the worms came from.

They came from underground, burrowing through the soil to burst forth as a plague upon the earth. They may have begun as a scientists experiment that went awry, or maybe they were always there, lurking deep in the earth, waiting for their time to come.

The worms appeared first in sparsely populated areas, places no one cared for, which meant humanity was able to ignore them for years. Then the worms started coming closer, and closer, taking up more space, invading farmland, cutting off highways. By the time the worms were noticed it was almost too late.

The worms conquered prairies and deserts, a slow crawl over the land, pushing humans into cities behind walls. As humanity built fortresses of arc-like zoos and hydroponic farms the worms multiplied. They reproduced asexually, endlessly, exponentially, creating wormseas. For a long time all humanity could do was try to hold back the tide.

Then come the ships. The ships are developed to fight back. Engineered in laboratories, they’re great Bio-mechanical beasts that fly low over the wormseas. The ships glide on leathery wings and thrumming engines. Giant hinged jaws open to scoop up their prey, then strong teeth and motorized choppers turn the worms to pulp, satisfying the creature’s hunger. The refuse of the worm waste is burned as fuel. The ships are creatures of mad science and hope. They’re beautiful, improbable, unnatural things designed to fend off monsters.

Humanity built the ships, humanity needs the ships, but the ships need people too. The ships are smart, there’s an alien intelligence hiding in their vast eyes, but they don’t talk. They can’t communicate on their own. They need an empathic human to translate the churning of their thoughts into language that other humans can understand.

Darcy is seven when the test comes. Boys and girls get pulled out of class. One after another they go with the men in black suits to the nurse's office. Darcy watches as his classmates leave, returning twenty minutes later with a sticker and a lollipop. He isn’t scared to go when his turn came.

He should have been.

He sits in a grown up chair. He’s tall for his age, but his feet still tangle above the floor.  
There’s a box on the table covered by a dark cloth. There’s something living in the box. Darcy can hear it breathing. 

They make him wear a hat. It’s made of two pieces that surround his head, metal bars framing his face, a cage to look out of. It’s heavy. They ask him questions: can he hear the whispers, does he know what card this is, can he see what is written on the paper inside this envelope.

Yes, he hears the whispers, it’s the Jack of Hearts, it’s a star with an X in the middle.

Darcy can feel the men in suit exchange meaningful glances above his head.

“Can I go now?” he asks.

“I’m sorry, son,” the First Suit says, “but you’re going to have to come with us.”

No, that’s wrong. 

“No, I have to go back to class,” he says. 

They have math in the afternoon, but there’s lunch first, and Darcy has three cookies today.

They don’t care. He gets ushered out of the building with the two suits into a shiny black car. They don’t let him go get his bag. They say they’ve taken care of calling his mother. He doesn’t even get a sticker.

_fifteen years later_

Darcy knows his ship. It talks to him constantly, and he talks back. He’s a keeper, the most vital position on the crew. He translates for the beast, passing on instructions and observations. Without a keeper on board the ship would follow the wind and its own whims.

He’s important, they need him. Everyone is perfectly polite. Too polite sometimes, almost cold.

Keepers are revered and puzzled over. They are the keystone of the crew, yet set apart from it. The mechanics that attend the engines and the forward guard who fend off the worms respect their ship's keepers without relating to them.

It is difficult to relate to a man who talks to the walls, even if you know the walls talk back. Keepers aren’t the same as everyone else. There’s something in their heads that allows them to hear the creatures. As valuable as this ability is, it’s also strange. It’s an abnormality, an anomaly, freakshow weird.

He’s had time to get used to not fitting in. He’s been assigned to the Aero for more than a year now. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but it’s home. He has routines.

Each ship needs at least two keepers so there is always someone awake to communicate with the ship. Darcy eats breakfast with Matt before the other keeper goes to bed. 

It’s nice to have a moment of companionship to start the day. The ship’s crew doesn’t mix much with the keepers, who they consider _peculiar._ Darcy and Matt have a working relationship with the ship's engineers, but the forwards who battle worms off the nose of the ship are another story. They don’t have any reason to interact with the keepers; for the most part this is just how they like it. They leave him alone, he leaves them alone, it all works out.

After breakfast Darcy starts walking through the ship, asking how it feels. He’s trailed by a crew of engineers ready to soothe aches and fix malfunctions.

Every day he walks the ship. He listens to its aches and pains, telling the crew where it hurts, what needs to be fixed.

The day things change is exceedingly normal until the very last minute. Over dinner he talks to Matt while the other man eats breakfast, then returns to his room. There are a few hours to spend as he will before retiring to bed. He falls asleep easier on the ship than anywhere else. He’s rocked by the vague sensation of motion, and by the hum of animal and machine.

Darcy blinks rapidly, thrown from his sleep. The ship is upset about something. Darcy hasn’t heard this before; the ship sounds angry, it might sound sad. Darcy had never known a ship to get angry out of battle, and hadn’t known a ship could be sad. He thinks he hears sadness in the low whine, a downward progression of minor chords that rattle his head and jar his teeth.

His shift doesn’t start for hours, but he can’t ignore the ship's distress. He dresses quickly and goes to find Matt, and find out what’s going on.

His movements add to the melody, bright high notes that speed up as he nears the command room.

“Good, you’re here,” the Captain says. “We were going to send an ensign to bring you, but Hackett said it wouldn’t be necessary.”

“Yeah, I heard the ship. What’s happening?’

“Hackett has been reassigned.” The Captain doesn’t look up from his paperwork. He’s ignoring both keepers present. “He’s headed for Rochester in the morning.”

This shouldn’t happen. Darcy can’t look after the ship all by himself.

“And his replacement?” Darcy asks. Matt isn’t making eye contact. The ship is singing for him, a ballad for how much it will miss his presence.

“There isn’t one for the time being,” the Captain explains. “It’s an emergency situation.”

The mind boggles. Darcy doesn’t understand. “Sir, if I am left as the only keeper on the Aero _we_ will be an emergency situation.”

“I am aware of that,” the Captain says. “We’re looking for a proper replacement. Until one can be found—well—you’ll have to make do.”

The Captain looks up from his papers, nods once, then dismisses them both.

Darcy and Matt make their into the corridor, still in shock.

“This is really happening?” Darcy asks, unbelieving.

Matt nods. So much for wishing this was only a dream.

“Shit. Do you know what happened in Rochester?” Darcy asks.

“Not really,” Matt says. “Apparently they’re listing.”

“Shit, really?” That means they don’t have anyone in their crew who can communicate with the ship, not even a passive Receiver, who would only dimly be able to hear the ship speak, incapable of carrying on a conversation. This isn’t supposed to happen. There are protocols in place, safeguards. Something terrible must have happened. “Was it a crash?” Darcy asks.

“Hell if I know,” Hack says, adding, “They don’t tell us anything, except for where we need to go.”

He’s right to be angry. If it was a crash who knows what shape the ship is in, who knows what type of melody will greet him. The ship is listing, its mind cut off from humanity, and Matt is getting sent to steer it back on course. He’s getting sent into a headache, leaving Darcy here to hold things together on his own.

“Fuck.” Swearing makes him feel a little bit better. “Just—fuck.”

Matt nods seriously. “You should go back to bed. Get a good night’s sleep. You’re going to need it.”

“I don’t really want to,” Darcy says.

“Yeah, well who gives a damn about what you want. From here on out all that matters is what what’s best for the ship.”

“Yeah.” Darcy has no idea how this is going to work. He is highly suspicious that this _isn’t_ going to work, but it isn’t like he can just not try. “Yeah, I’ll go to bed.”

“Good. Now scram.”

It might feel like Matt’s bullying him, but he’s just looking after their ship, which is still singing. “Yeah, I’ll go to bed, but like, you know I’ll miss you, right?”

“Yeah, like we spend so much time together.”

There always has to be someone awake to hear the ship, which means usually one of them is asleep. They’re always nearly missing each other, their sleep patterns barely overlap, but they understand each other more than anyone else aboard. They’re the only ones who hear the ship. They’ve gotten to know each other some in the stray moments at the start and end of the day, but more so by the creature's tendency to gossip.

“I’ll miss listening to the ship talk about its nights with you,” Darcy says honestly. It always seemed like Matt and the ship had interesting adventures while he slept. Matt had guided it through more battles than Darcy ever has.

Matt smiles sadly. “Yeah, that’s mutual.”

Matt holds out his fist. Darcy bumps their hands together, but that’s not good enough. He pulls Matt in for a hug.

Darcy goes back to bed, but he has a hard time falling asleep. The ship is loud and plaintive, fixated on the mundane pain of the gears grinding against its flesh and the motors burning its skin. Darcy wants to get up and make it feel better, even though he knows there’s nothing he can do. He was trained to treat the beast’s pain, this goes against all his instincts. Eventually he’s able to fall off, knowing that in the morning it will all be his responsibility.

Things are different without Matt. 

Darcy is depended on in a new way. Before he was the junior keeper on board, now he is the _only_ one. Everything the ship goes through him. There’s so much space to cover, so many operations to check. The ship is a living, breathing machine, prone to mechanical malfunctions and breakdowns. It has aches and pains, twinges in its biological parts.

The ship works best when there is someone always awake and alert to listen to its complaints and relay them to the crew. The ship is needy, it doesn’t like being ignored. It likes to have someone to talk to every moment of the day. That isn’t possible right now. Darcy is on his own, doing the best that he can.

He’s working his usual shift, and as much of Matt’s shift as he can. He’s hardly sleeping. His eyes stay closed enough to keep him upright and mostly functional but not any longer. 

He doesn’t know half of the engineers he’s working with. They’re used to Matt, who was a different kind of strange. Matt liked to say sharp words to see if they’d cut. He liked to shout. Darcy mostly rambles and smiles a whole lot. He trusts the crew more than Matt ever did. Darcy just wants what’s best for the ship, and figures that must be what they want too. Matt used call him naive, and say he’d figure it out eventually. For the crews, ships are ships. They’re tools in a war. For Matt and Darcy the ships are the whole world.

Darcy was pulled from the real world when he was seven. He spent years learning about how the ships work, living in the shipyards. There were classes to attend, and time spent clammering through the scaffolding that’s put up around a young ship as it grows. It certainly wasn’t a normal childhood.

This is different than the engineers who keep the ship running and the forward shooters who fight off the worms--they don’t leave home to start their mandatory service until they’re at least fifteen, sometimes later. For the most part they’ll serve their term, and go do something else, assuming they live. Darcy will always be working with the ships. It won’t always be active battle through the wormseas, but he never gets to quit. Why would he want to? He wouldn’t get to hear the ships if he left. There’d be far too much silence in his head.

Other people don’t understand. They’ve only ever known the silence.

Talking to people can be...strange. Darcy’s pretty normal for a keeper. He’s normaler than Matt. He smiles a lot. He’s never ripped a wrench from someone’s hands and whacked them with it because they were accidentally hurting the ship while trying to fix a pipe. Matt did that once, tired and cranky at the end of his shift. Darcy was startled awake by the ships proud-pleased chatter. Darcy’s normal for a keeper, but he still doesn’t fit in. He’s still _odd._

The way that it used to work was that Matt was on the darkshift and Darcy was on the sunshift. Darcy mostly only saw engineers from the Orange and Blue shifts. Now he’s spending more time with ones from the Black as well. It doesn’t work so well, probably because Darcy isn’t really sleeping. It’s hard for anything to work with this little sleep.

Well, except for the ship. The ship doesn’t need to sleep. The ship will just keep going, on and on. Sometimes the creature will drift into dreams, but the machines never stop. The ship is both the creature and the machines, and the machines never stop to dream. Darcy isn’t a ship. He would like to be able sleep, and to dream, but the ship is always awake, and the ship needs him, through the dark and through the sun.

Getting used to the new engineers isn’t easy. It isn’t that they’re bad, just new, and different. Darcy is used to his engineers. Chay, who leads the orange shift, is short and laughs a lot. Darcy is fairly fond of him. The dark shift engineers are different.

Darcy’s worked with the blue shift before, but there’s someone new in charge. Spurgeon did his time, now he’s off on some base being useful in a manner where there’s less of a risk for him to get eaten by a worm. Spurg was short too, and smiled sometimes. Spurg was very good at what he did.

The new kid seems pretty good too though. Quiet. Definitely a kid. Darcy asks how old he is one day, and Jonas says nineteen. Christ. Darcy knows being a keeper meant he didn’t have much of a childhood. Sometimes he forgets that the worms took that from all of them. The difference is that hopefully Jonas will go on and do something else with his life, while Darcy is never getting out.

Blackshift is interesting. Darcy’s never worked blackshift much, it was always almost entirely Matt’s. Marco Scandella is loud. He talks with his hands. He often has engine grease smeared on his face. It’s not a bad look for him. He’s tall, not as tall as Darcy, but much taller than Chay.

If Darcy’s working the blackshift it means he hasn’t slept in ages. It makes working with Marco interesting. The connection between the keeper and the ship isn’t physical, it’s all mental, so Darcy can wander around, and he does, walking around the ship and touching the walls, asking if it’s okay. Marco’s job is to follow him around, and if the ship says it’s uncomfortable, or in pain, he tries to fix it, with Darcy translating. 

Talking to the Aero when he’s this tired is interesting. Their exchanges are evanescent, bubbling back and forth. The Aero seems to understand Darcy’s state of mind, that he isn’t entirely making sense. The Aero seems to be enjoying it, responding by teasing, bright chimes like laughter. It makes Darcy feel good to know the ship can stay so lighthearted when a pipe cracked, causing coolant to drip down its skin, freezing and burning. But Darcy lead Marco to the damage, and Marco’s fixing it, and the ship is very pleased with the situation. The Aero thinks Marco is...cute? That’s the closest translation he can come up with. The Aero thinks Darcy should think Marco is cute.

Darcy hadn’t really considered it before, but he can see it. Marco’s all grubby with engine oil and has his shirtsleeves rolled up, and really knows what to do with a wrench. He’s making the ship feel better, and he looks good doing it.

Marco stops what he’s doing to stare up at Darcy.

Oh. That probably meant he was using his outside voice. Not sleeping is terrible. He definitely meant to keep that thought inside.

“Um…” Darcy has no idea what to say next. The ship is buzzing, delighted by his mistake. The ship approves of his comments.

“So if I were to ask you out, you’d say yes?” Marco asks.

Maybe this is going to work out alright. Darcy is so tired, he doesn’t think, he just says, “Yeah. I’d, yeah. I’d totally say yes.”

“Cool,” Marco says, before turning back to the gasket he had been working on.

Darcy stares at him. Shouldn’t there be more to this.

Marco is treating it like this is normal, which...well, it really isn’t. Darcy’s a keeper. He has the ship. There are people who think he shouldn’t have anything else, that he shouldn’t want anything else. They think the ship should be a keeper’s whole life. Even the crew who sees keepers everyday struggle with the idea that they might have human desires of their own outside the cares and concerns of the ships only they can hear.

This whole possibility is really strange, and Darcy doesn’t quite know what to make of it. “Look, I haven’t really, um, dated, a whole lot. Or whatever this is, which is...whatever you want it to be, I guess.”

“Then I guess there’s a lot of pressure for me to not fuck this up,” Marco says.

“I didn’t mean — are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. We should give it a try. But like, when you’re well rested and stuff isn’t crazy.”

That does seem like a better plan.

That’s all that happens for a while. Marco flirts with him. At least Darcy thinks that’s what’s happening. He’s trying to flirt back. He doesn’t know how well he’s doing, but he’s enjoying himself. He likes talking to Marco while he’s sleep deprived as they work on the ship. It’s fun, and the idea of hanging out more is something nice to hold onto.

Weeks pass, but eventually the fragile ecosystem of the ship is going to get stabilized again. 

“You hear the news?” Marco asks. Darcy shakes his head. Since he woke up all he’s paid attention to is the song of the ship. He hasn’t had any time to catch up with the crew’s chatter.

“We’re finally getting another keeper. Gustafsson — Gus, he’s coming in from Sweden next week.”

This is wonderful. He’s going to start getting full nights of sleep. This is so wonderful.

“Now that there’s someone else to share the load are the shifts going to go back to the way they were before? Or are you gonna keep hanging out?”

Oh. There’s that as well. It isn’t that Darcy had forgotten about this, about their promised date, it’s just that he’s really excited about getting enough rest. The ship is cackling at his oversight. Sometimes it’s good that Darcy’s the only one who can hear the Aero. He’s going to play it cool. “I guess I could stick around this shift. I might miss you otherwise.”

Marco smiles. The ship cheers. It’s happy for them. Darcy smiles back.


End file.
